Ben Temperton (PI) is a former professional software engineer who spent seven years leading teams of up to 10 people to design and implement large commercial systems. In 2007, he retrained in Marine Biology, receiving his PhD from Queens University Belfast in Marine Microbiology in 2011 and publishing extensively in seasonal dynamics within microbial communities in the Western English Channel, and applications and limitations of metagenomics as a tool for microbial ecology. He spent two years as a postdoctoral scholar with Steve Giovannoni (Oregon State University), where he learned to culture the focus of this study (the Pelagibacterales), published extensively on Pelagibacterales ecology and characterised its newly discovered viruses. Upon his return to the UK, he established the UK’s first environmental Single-Cell Genomics facility at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, raising £1M in capital from NERC and the Wolfson Foundation. He was appointed at the University of Exeter in 2015 as a Lecturer in Bioinformatics, where he continues to investigate host-virus interactions through experimental and bioinformatic approaches. He currently holds a NERC grant to develop long-read viromics on the MinION platform from Oxford Nanopore Technologies (NE/P008534/1) in collaboration with virologist Matt Sullivan (Ohio State University). He is a fellow of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences as part of a five-year investigation into microbial influences on open-ocean carbon remineralisation funded by the Simons Foundation International, and continues to collaborate with Giovannoni as part of a Joint Genome Institute Community Sequencing Project using single-cell genomics data to investigate Pelagibacterales ecology and evolution in natural populations